Hi Charles,

Is the PDF you're trying to extract text from a scanned document? If so,
you likely can't highlight the text because it's technically an image. You
can apply Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to rectify this. GIMP doesn't
have OCR capabilities, though there are a few plugins floating around on
Github. If you don't have the paid version of Acrobat, you can look into
other OCR software options. Here is a list of projects
<https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/User-Projects-%E2%80%93-3rdParty.html>
that use the Tesseract engine, many of which are simple drag and drop
solutions.

Best,
Magnus

On May 28, 2023, 4:11 PM -0400, charles meyer <[log in to unmask]>,
wrote:

My esteem listmates,

I've read through Googled results which many suggest in Acrobat Reader
(fee) I should be able to highlight words in a PDF and copy and paste them
into a Word document as plain text.

My Acrobat Reader won't do that.

Is there an easier way to do this in GIMP?

I found a good Web site for learning GIMP skills with screenshots - for the
unintimidated - https://thegimptutorials.com/

but I didn't find any tutorials re: extracting words out of a PDF. Might
it be referenced as some other term of GIMP?

My goal is to extract names, phone #s and email addresses out of scanned
business cards and paste them into Word as plain text.

Thank you.

Charles.

Charlotte County Public Library